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Session 36 - Solar Activity.
Display session, Tuesday, June 11
Tripp Commons,
We investigate the kink instability of twisted magnetic flux tubes in the solar convection zone. The possibility that kinking flux tubes are responsible for the formation of some flare productive active regions provides the motivation for this work. Our earlier work has shown that twisted magnetic flux tubes in the solar convection zone are linearly unstable to the kink mode for a wide range of conditions. We report on the preliminary results of our numerical simulations of the nonlinear evolution of these tubes. We simulate the evolution of a twisted flux tube with a highly parallelized three dimensional MHD spectral code run on a 128 cubed grid. This code is run on the Naval Research Laboratory's CM5. We will discuss the results of these simulations and their implications.
This work was supported by NASA GSRP training grant NGT-51377, the NASA High Performance Computing and Communications Program, NSF grant AST-9218085 and NASA grant NAGW 3429. The numerical simulations were performed under a grant of time from the DoD HPC program.
